About Me

Friday, 30 April 2010

You'll need to use your imagination!

The air has been blue while I've tried to write this post. It has taken so long to do anything on my laptop today that I nearly gave up, then having carefully organised the loading of my pics in the right order, a little box flashed up on the screen telling me that there was a download failure for the pic above and couldn't get it on to my blog. However, I tried again when I'd finished the post and here it is - in the wrong place of course. It shows a section of three of my strips which will eventually be joined together somehow (!) to make up a fairly large panel which will hopefully look a bit like a series of allotments. My inspiration came from seeing our local town allotments on Google Earth.

I started by tearing long thin strips of green fabric about 3-4cms wide then prepared a selection of other strips to be cut into short lengths and applied to them. I made these other strips by machine couching ribbon with automatic stitches, fabric paper, heavy yarn and anything else I could think of, in close rows on another green fabric. When all the stitching was done I cut the strips apart, ready to be reassembled on the main pieces. I was looking for variations in colour and texture.

I also made tiny pieces of knitting, some of which I embellished to felt and then worked from the back to push the felt fibres through to the front in places. These will be added here and there to provide variation in the textures of the piece and more stitching will be needed to unify all the little bits and bring everything together.

I discovered some failures in a bag and embellished those too - they might be cut into small pieces and applied to the green fabric. I may machine stitch on them first or when they are applied - I am having to make decisions as I go along. I prefer to know from the start what I am going to do but time was running out on me so I began work without being able to see the finished piece in my mind.

These paper beads are just the right colours. I could add one or two here and there if they look right. I have no idea how to finish this piece or whether it will be framed or be a wall hanging.

This has been recycled from another piece of work altogether and used to be a study in tree bark! I have unpicked quite a lot of heavy top stitching and may take off even more. It was also manipulated to suggest the undulations and fissures in a very craggy bark and I've had such a job to flatten it. In reality it is not as pink and blue as it appears here, but much more green and bronzey and quite a bit darker. I am hoping to turn it into another Google piece - possibly 'Moorland'. If I get stuck on either of these I can always start on Google Quarry and totally stress myself!

I shall be so interested to see that allotment piece when it is finished, Heather. I have had a similar idea for ages - to put all the houses on an Italian hillside into a piece but try as I might I get discouraged when I begin to plan it - don't you think there is a stage in all this kind of work where one feels it is not going to work out - you have to work through that I think. Good luck - and do show us the finished article - it will give me hope!

It already looks like an allotment Heather. I'm so glad you've bought an Embellisher, you will enjoy it so much. This was my first visit to your blog for a while. I'm taking a day off because it's bank holiday :)